![]() You can see the list of key features below, via 2K's press release: Now they have a chance to make it better.In addition, Rising Tide will expand the role of diplomacy, and let players unlock new hybrid Affinity units and upgrades. David McDonough, Will Miller and the Civilization: Beyond Earth Development team got a chance to make an audacious new game. Taking what they learned and modifying the game, they plan to ship it within the next few months. The Civilization: Beyond Earth Team, led by McDonough and Miller, is working on a patch that McDonough calls the "2.0" version of the game. Creating large, strange alien structures simply doesn't engender the same guttural feeling as creating the pyramids or Stonehenge. The same goes for the wonders system in Beyond Earth. "There needed to be more of a game in the diplomacy system," Miller said. Instead, they decided to leave it to players' imaginations, hoping they'd fill in the gaps. If they'd understood this earlier, they might've have released the reams of fiction that they wrote and kept to themselves. And they didn't learn that until after release. The "psychology of it" was different, McDonough said. Players just don't form the same type of attachment to fictional, futuristic humans from an alien planet as they did with Catherine the Great, who hailed from Russia. It had to create its own characters that, the developers hoped, would serve the same purpose as Gandhi and Napoleon and Genghis Khan. But by moving off world, Beyond Earth couldn't cash in on that familiarity. It grounds the player in history, in the real world. When Gandhi shows up and threatens to nuke someone, that has meaning beyond pure hilarity. That's why the series' diplomacy and leader systems, which cover relationships between civilizations and place well-known historical figures as their spokespeople, work so well. And that brings us back to Gandhi.Ĭivilization, before Beyond Earth, was always grounded in our planet and its history. McDonough offered what may be the best example of what he called their "conservative" development decisions. But bugs are just one part of what they want to fix. If there had been a beta, this might not still be a problem. ![]() Not only did they not catch some of the bugs that an upcoming patch will fix, but the small test group wasn't able to provide an adequate amount of feedback. They now realize that the sample size was too small. So when creating new systems and designing others around well-established Civilization concepts, they relied heavily on their quality assurance team and some dedicated fans who got early code. Their approach during development tried to walk the line between the familiar and the new. They were making a Civ game, but it was an oddball. They had good reason to be, but it now seems somewhat misguided.Ī Miller explained, they knew it would be compared directly to its predecessor, a reality both understandable and somewhat unfair. Despite its departure, McDonough admits that Beyond Earth suffers from "a little bit of lack of ambition," because he and Miller "pulled our punches a little bit." The problem, they now understand, is that they were a bit too cautious and a bit too revenant to previous games. Though it's something of a spiritual successor to the 1999 Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, game's other-worldly premise was new for Civilization. Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth is the follow-up to Civilization 5 and its expansions. Polygon Video: The cinematic opening to Civilization: Beyond Earth The upcoming patch is their attempt to fix their creation, many of whose mistakes began in a game they didn't create. These days, more than four months after its October 2014 release, they're hard at work on what McDonough characterizes as the 2.0 version of Beyond Earth. The good news for McDonough and Miller is that, at Firaxis, releasing a game isn't the same thing as finishing a game. And some of those things would have probably been caught in a beta they never had. When creating their first Civilization game, they got some things wrong. In several ways, the newcomers now know they were a little too cautious. It was received with critical acclaim last year.īeyond Earth wasn't all bold new frontiers, though. They took the franchise off-world for the first time, eschewing the comfortable confines of Earth for alien landscapes. And they would do it at the studio where the man whose name appears on its games resides. Not long ago, developer Firaxis Games gave the young designers a chance that few get: To create a radical new entry in the venerable Civilization series. The duo detailed their triumphs and shortcomings in a 2015 Game Developers Conference presentation - and discussed their plan to fix their shortcomings by being bolder where they were once more timid. These are problems that the co-lead designers hope to fix.
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